105 hours: Track time at work

I use a set of tactics and principles to manage my time. I call it 105 hours.

It helps me allocate the 105 hours I have in the week.

For many of us, most of those hours are spent at work.

Exactly how many hours, though, we don't know.

Workweek

"50-hour weeks, 60-hour weeks, 70-hour weeks" – I always found the breakdown of hours worked in the week fascinating.

My first job was as an intern at a telecom R&D lab – exciting work with brilliant people and a fantastic opportunity for someone like me with no network.

I had a 35 hours a week contract, assuming I got into work at noon and left at seven. I was paid by the hour, so I had to track my hours precisely.

I was also broke, so I had every incentive to work those 35 hours weekly.

And it was surprisingly hard.

Some days would be more manageable; college went as planned, lunch got ready quickly, I had no evening commitments and could stay until seven.

But things didn't always go as planned: The restaurant was packed, and I was late getting my food. I had to stop by the library to get books after an assignment. Traffic. Oh, traffic, what is it this time? I extend my badge to the reader at the front door to come at 12:30 pm, so now I need to stay until 7:30 pm, which means getting home at 8:30 pm to clock my seven hours.

Yes, each of those out-of-the-ordinary things only happened once in a while, but when all possible out-of-the-ordinary things got added together, every week had one or more of them happening.

It's very hard to have a week run precisely as planned, like clockwork, from Monday through Friday. Extremely hard.

Multiply that difficulty by several weeks, and if we're tracking time precisely, we'll note it's almost impossible to have a consistent number of hours worked week after week.

Accountability for precise time tracking showed me that difficulty early in my career.

Overestimating successes, underestimating failures

We are natural overestimators of personal accomplishments and underestimators of personal shortcomings.

When we estimate instead of track anything related to us, we'll often bias it up or down depending on whether it makes us look good or bad.

Everybody does that – it's called the overconfidence effect.

Culturally, working many hours is good. It means you have a work ethic and are virtuous, something to brag about. Working a few hours, on the other hand, is bad. It means your work isn't that valuable or necessary or that you're unreliable or lazy. It's something to change.

So it's no wonder that most of us who estimate instead of track time are overestimating it when it comes to weekly hours worked.

In her book 168 hours, Laura Vanderkam talks about discrepancies in time tracking and our beliefs coming from estimation. Note these figures don't account for holidays and vacations at all; they're only about average hours worked on a whole work week:

Sociologists have studied these questions as well. It turns out that there is a fundamental flaw in the data used to support the claim that we suffer from time poverty and overwork: we lie.
We may not do so on purpose, but we have trouble remembering or calculating things exactly when a pollster wants a quick answer, and in the absence of concrete memories, we are prone to over- or underestimate things based on socially desirable perceptions or current emotions. [..]
And so we claim to work more hours than time diaries reveal we do. Indeed, back in the 1990s, when the University of Maryland sociologist John Robinson and his colleagues analyzed people’s estimates of how much they worked, and compared those to the time diaries, they found that the more hours people claimed to work, the more inaccurate they were. You can guess in which direction. Almost no one who claimed a 70-hour workweek was underestimating. Indeed, the average person who claimed to work more than 75 hours per week generally logged about 55. When I contacted Robinson recently, he sent me a working paper he was drafting using more recent numbers, from 2006–2007. The time spent working had come up a little for people whose estimated hours showed workaholic tendencies, but even so, the average person who claimed to be working 60–69 hours per week was actually logging 52.6, and the average person claiming to work 70, 80, 90, or more hours was logging less than 60.

Vanderkam, Laura. 168 Hours (p. 20). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

You may indeed work 50, 60, or 70 hours a week. But if you don't track it on a time diary, it's also very likely your belief is incorrect because estimating these things without bias is too difficult for us mortals.

Fixing this overestimating is impossible by simply deciding not to bias our estimates. It can only be corrected through precise tracking.